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Spring Term

Now the project, senior show are all completed. I have been thinking and review the senior project process and found out things that could be improved. I would like to share with you about what we did right and what we did wrong through out this 9 months project from my personal perspective.

What went right:

This project left a lot of great memory of working as a team. It simulates the professional teamwork pipeline.

We were able to follow the general guidelines and complete the project in a timely fashion.

Each of the member actually care about the project.

What went wrong:

The biggest mistake is that we allowed the CS team took the dominant position in the co-production. In the ideal situation, DIGM team should’ve made the decision and design the game. In this case, CS team could’ve act as a position of problem solver. They should’ve provide the function that we needed instead of we provided the art assets that they asked. DIGM team should have acted as the designer of the game mechanic and have the CS team to fulfill our technical requirement. However, the reality was the opposite. CS team decided what they could make so they put DIGM part of the team in their cage and eventually developed what they could make instead of what we wanted to make.

The second biggest mistake was that we went on 2D game. All of the DIGM member were good at 3D art but only one of them were in the position of 3D generalist. In our 4 years of education in GMAP program, we were especially focused on 3D game development. There was no acceptable reason for us to make a unprofessional 2D game for senior project, which was the most important project EVER in this program. Building a 2D game was not only ugly, but also a waste of our talent and resource. I have complained this 2D/3D issue in the past and the final product did not convince me at all. People were supporting 2D game except Ziyang and myself. Building a 2D game might be more comfortable for the CS team on coding and data transmission, so CS team was fully voting for it. Also Jordie had better 2D art skill when Resh and Patrick were fine with either way. Therefore, the team went on this weird 2D+fake 3D game. Compare with Mirrors of Grimody and The Knowledge we seek, 3D games are always more beautiful then 2D game. (EXCEPT we got super talented 2D artists who could make art like Ori and the Blind Forest or even Limbo)

The third biggest mistake was we did not start earlier enough do pre-production. Although the team was formed in the summer, but we did not have a full member meeting nor a solid concept until late August. There were a lot of cooler/more brilliant concept were ditched. I remember Resh made a spaceship game prototype was really awesome and it was the biggest shame that we did not push that concept. Zach got a prototype of a semi-music game. Either of them should be our senior project game. If we used them as our senior project, I believe we had a better starting point at fall quarter. Especially if we chose Resh’s spaceship game, we could have a better chance of even winning the GDC conference. I basically made up my mind to joined the team because of Resh’s prototype. I had all of the cool sci-fi designs and ideas that there was no way to present in Remote Raiders. I felt cheated. (lol)

We have attended our Drexel game expo in Creese student center. We tried to expose our game as much as we could. The most important thing is that people love Remote Raiders. We witnessed the players talked and shouted to each other as a part of gameplay. We also got a lot of useful feedback. Moreover, we understood that when the player complained about something means there is something wrong out there, but what they suggest usually not the best solution.

Next Sunday, which is 7days from now, will be our senior show!!! Woooohoooo!!! There will be playtesting and free food.

We have improved our slides and they look nicer than ever. We recorded a couple new game-play footage with higher qualities for demonstration and trailer. A lot of place holder images have been updated by the REAL images. The structure of the presentation has also been modified.

Last week, we showed off our game on Philly Tech Week (PTW), although it was postponed to Saturday, due to weather. It was nice to not get our equipment all wet.

A lot of people played our demo and we collected a lot of valuable data. I believe a lot of you guys in front of the screen went to the event. RIGHT? It was good to see people enjoy our game and communicate with each other as our game encouraged.

And now, we are going to prepare for the senior show. Until next time!

This week, we mainly focusing on backing up our team when the rest went to ECGC. JD, Patrick and I took cared the presentation when Jordie and Resh and our programming team were attending East Coast Gaming Conference(ECGC). We spent a lot of time on working on the new presentation. Other than that, we did not have much progress on production, but we are planning to catch up next week according to our play test data in the conference.

What a ride! We headed down to North Carolina for ECGC last week, and it was exciting! We had a proper booth, and showed off our game with style and flair the likes of which haven’t been seen before or since! Actually it was probably just very okay.

Production didn’t happen much last week, just because the team was split up. But we’re ready to get moving again!

Today a handful of us spent our time heading to the great state of North Carolina, for the East Coast Gaming Conference! I’m part of our “expeditionary forces”, which means I’ll be down on the floor helping demo our game throughout the day! Also I might be “schmoozing” so to speak. We’ll see.

This week I helped with some GUI polish. While I admit, we didn’t fix everything we wanted to in time for the conference, we did manage to get a lot of stuff done! Hopefully I’ll have more to post next week.

Anyway, see you all in a week, hopefully with some exciting tales of daring adventure!

Golly jeepers, or whatever you young kids say, have we got news! Now that I’m over my mysterious illness (Or back from my secret mission to save the planet? The world may never know.) Anyhow, in addition to the usual work update, I’ve been helping plot our trip to the East Coast Gaming Conference!

We’ll have a booth set up there at Indie Alley, demo-ing the game! Isn’t that great? Otherwise all I really achieved this week in quantifiable “on the game itself” work was some major layout fixes to the Prison level, and some minor tweaks to the other two.

This also marks my first PPJ without an hours breakdown, which feels pretty weird if I’m being wholly honest. I feel like I should be putting something here, so I guess I’ll leave you guys with a cool quote:

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life. – Terry Pratchett

We make a lot of improvement of the UI on the client (phone) device. Now we are using this “case folder” for the character selection scene. The buttons and the UI lay out have dramatically updated at the same time.

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Besides of that, I believe you have noticed already. That’s right, we have shaded all of the characters. Ivan Handabah and Dr. Walter Wattz are now shaded. They have more vivid looks in the game.

This week, I worked with Patrick planning out, improve and revise our phone GUI. Because the phone GUI has the most problems, it became our biggest focus point and we are going to need to revise it and make t look good in the next couple week. I started work on the buttons as the starting point. Several new buttons are finished and added to the phone UI scene. Those are going to replace a lot of the “programmer’s art”

Patrick already posted what we have sketched so I am not going to re-post them here. As for the character selection and map selection menu, they will have a more graphical new look coming out in the following week.